November 30, 2017 Arts & Culture Tuli Kupferberg’s Yeah!: The Tiny Magazine That Captured the 1960s By Alex Zafiris Interior spread from issue no. 4 of Yeah! It was 1961. Eisenhower had cut ties with Cuba, JFK was sworn in, the Berlin Wall went up, the Shirelles were in the top ten for “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” and America fizzed with the unchartered sexual dynamics created by the newly introduced pill. Meanwhile, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the homegrown poet-anarchist Tuli Kupferberg—already immortalized as the figure who survived after leaping off the Brooklyn Bridge in Allen Ginsberg’s 1955 poem “Howl”—put out the first issue of Yeah! The opening page presented the zine as “a satyric excursion published at will,” and it begins: I want to put the revolution at the service of poetry. I want Comrade Stalin to say Tuli, tell me how to revive the bodies of my dead Ukrainian peasants with your magic words Recently re-released in facsimile edition by the publishing non-profit Primary Information, the original ten issues of Yeah! were made at Kupferberg’s home on Tenth Street and Avenue B with the help of his wife, Sylvia Topp, and printed on a mimeograph. Kupferberg asked his friends to contribute. Many delivered poetry and art, such as Allan Sillitoe, Judson Crews, Brigid Murnaghan, Peter Schumann, Anita Steckel, William Wantling; others facilitated. Jonas Mekas submitted a poem from Der Spiegel by Yevgeny Yevtushenko; Ken Jacobs provided newspaper clip collages of absurd, tone-deaf reporting. Other sourced items—a misogynist cartoon from the Yale Record, a New York Times correction detailing the war injuries of a Vietnamese child, happy news of an anti-crossdressing electric shock treatment—are laid bare, their absurdity and cruelty thrown into sharp relief. Read More
November 30, 2017 Life Sentence The Sentence That Is a Story By Jeff Dolven In our eight-part series Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven takes apart and puts back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence. The artist Tom Toro illustrates each sentence Dolven chooses. ©Tom Toro The first thing I want to do is give you the sentence, so here it is. I typed it, and now you read it, in that order: And the first thing I wanted to do, but I did not do it, was pray. Read More
November 30, 2017 Arts & Culture Painting the American Dream at Guantánamo By Paige Laino Muhammad Ansi, Untitled (Field with Windmill). Thirty-six artworks made by detainees while at Guantánamo Bay are currently on display at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in midtown Manhattan. To view them, however, takes persistence. You must possess both a photo ID and enough patience to explain to the security guard that the college does indeed have an art gallery. You then have to navigate the building: down an escalator, up an elevator, past an indoor rifle range and a rooftop tennis court, until you finally reach the President’s Gallery, outside her offices. It’s hardly the Met. The exhibition opened in early October (my cocurator, Erin Thompson, wrote about it for The Paris Review.) On November 16, the Miami Herald reported that in response to the show, the Pentagon has stopped releasing security-screened prisoner art and has declared that, as the Herald wrote, “the art made by wartime captives is U.S. government property.” One attorney even told the Herald that the U.S. military intends to burn the art. Since then, the exhibition has gotten a new wave of media attention. Because it is so difficult to actually access the artwork, few of the people reporting and commenting on the art have actually seen it. The exhibition has become largely symbolic. Read More
November 30, 2017 Ask The Paris Review Dear Lynda: Diary Snoops and Ill-Advised Marriages By Lynda Barry Have a question for Lynda Barry? Email us. A self-portrait by Lynda Barry. Dear Lynda, I am a bit of a snoop, though I’ve really been trying to be better about it. But lately, my new roommate has taken to leaving her diary in the bathroom. This is just curious behavior anyway. Is she documenting her bladder movements? I need to know! I must resist! Help me. All the very best, Nosy in Nashville Dear Nosy, Get your own diary and make sure it’s about the same size as hers and leave it in the bathroom beside hers. Write in your diary about how badly you want to read her diary but you know you must resist. And how you have resisted. And why you must continue to resist. Do a still-life drawing of her diary in your diary. If her diary is still in the bathroom in a week, write about that. At the end of the year, you may have a book on your hands. Sincerely, Lynda B. Read More
November 29, 2017 Arts & Culture Listen: Hemingway’s Unrequited High School Crush By Robert K. Elder A undated photo of Frances Coates, Ernest Hemingway’s unrequited high school crush. It was as if a lightning bolt struck the teenage Ernest Hemingway, right there in the orchestra pit. Although Frances Coates, seventeen, was only cast as “Third Servant” in the high school performance of Martha, her brief opera solo made an impact on Hemingway, sixteen, who was playing cello and gazing up at her. The biographer Carlos Baker describes how a classmate of Hemingway’s made a caricature of a boy with desperate eyes and labeled it: “Erney sees a girl named Frances.” Baker also notes that Hemingway was too shy to ask Coates to prom. Now, you can hear that voice, in recordings recently found by Coates’s family. Read More
November 29, 2017 Novemberance Death’s Footsteps By Nina MacLaughlin This is the fifth and final installment of Nina MacLaughlin’s Novemberance column, which has run every Wednesday this month. Sharon Harper, Germany, mise en scene. 1997. Courtesy the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Some weeks ago, before the first frost, before the days got dark in the late afternoon, I took a walk in an unfamiliar place. The dirt trail gave way to a narrow planked walkway flanked on both sides by high grass and brambles. It smelled like late fall, that earthy vinegar stink of rotting leaves. To breathe in the damp and leafy woods-floor smell is to breathe in decay. It’s the fertile, fecund smell of compost, of farms, hay, ammonia, manure; there’s the fermenting yeasty tang of beer. It’s the smell of humification: a word that sounds more like the process of making someone. It’s a brown-red smell, deep and dense and fungal. I walked with someone who knew about plants, who’d tug at branches and look at the underbellies of leaves and show me what he knew. I felt lucky to learn, and tried to pay attention. The boardwalk footpath lead deeper into a boggy place, and the silence seemed to densify around us, and we tread with lighter steps. On the planked path he paused. “Sphagnum moss,” he said, pointing to a mound. I told him I did not like the word sphagnum, that it sounded like something you suffer from. “Feel it though,” he said. It was good advice. I crouched and pressed my palm into the moss. It was cool and damp and feathery, with a cushioned give, welcoming and soft. I wanted to lay my face in it, my whole body, to let the entire weight of me get absorbed into this cooling cloud of plant. Read More